D+
When I was growing up, I had a lot of different toys that I played with and a lot of different cartoons that I watched. I loved the Justice League of America, Transformers, the A-Team, and countless other little “teams” of soldier type characters that battled evil every Saturday. But I loved none as much as G.I. Joe, the real American hero, who battled the evil Cobra all across the globe in a never ending fight for freedom. I bought hundreds of the toys, made gigantic fortresses out of bricks and constantly had my Joe’s waging war against the enemy.
So as an adult, when I heard that they were making a live action film of my favorite childhood toy, my interest was immediately piqued. After all, G.I. Joe had the potential to be a great summer action franchise…plenty of interesting characters, weaponry, and several very cool villains. Alas…when making anything into a movie, be it a comic book, a child’s toy, or an old Saturday morning cartoon, there a few indispensable elements that Hollywood seems to have a hard time putting into movies these days. They are called plot and dialogue, and they are both absent in this big screen bust. Seriously…this is a terrible movie. I mean, really bad. Hasbro, the maker of the G.I. Joe toys, had already jaded our summer movie excitement by screwing up the second installment of Transformers 2. But things get even uglier with this second perversion of a beloved toy franchise.
Ok, so the good news is that if you expect this movie to be bad going in, you can still have fun. I think the producers and director, Stephen Sommers (The Mummy franchise) KNEW this was a bad movie and so didn’t try to hard to make it fit within the confines of any reality. I suspected once I saw the first trailer this movie was going to be a stinker, and my suspicions continued to be reinforced right up until the time I sat down to watch it. It met all my exceedingly low expectations. That said, I was still entertained, even if a few brain cells were destroyed in the process. You can’t help but feel dumber for having seen this, but it’s ok…you’ll have a good time anyway.
The Story…Or What Resembles One
The story starts with a flashback to 17th century France, where an arms merchant named McMullen is being sentenced for selling arms to France’s enemies. Before he undergoes his punishment (an iron mask ala Alexandre Dumas) he says that his descendants will continue the business of selling arms and become more powerful, yada yada yada. Fast forward to the future, and you see one of his descendants announcing the creation of a new weapon called nanomites, some kind of nanotechnology that can eat through anything. McMullen has had his research funded by NATO, and they are transporting it somewhere or another, but in the meantime he is secretly plotting to hijack the transport team and steal the nanomites for his own motives. He sends one of his best operatives, a stunning and vicious woman known as the Baroness (Sienna Miller) to get the nanomites. The Baroness encounters stiff resistance from two members of the transport team, Duke (Channing Tatum) and Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) who are then joined by secret operatives who prevent the theft of the nanomites. The operatives turn out to be G.I. Joe [led by General Hawk (Dennis Quaid)], a top secret global team that works against…well, I don’t know what, exactly, since there doesn’t seem to be any Cobra, at least not yet. Anyway, they take possession of the nanomites, and Duke and Ripcord join the team. Shortly thereafter, however, McMullen uses the Baroness, accompanied by a ninja named Storm Shadow and a master of disguise named Zartan (Arnold Vosloo) to infiltrate the Joes base and steal the nanomites.
It should be noted that this unfolding storyline is punctuated by flashbacks revealing several backstories that we just couldn’t live without. First is the connection between Duke and the Baroness…turns out that at one time they were engaged to be married, and the Baroness was a nice little blonde who loved her man. But due to an unfortunate (and I might add, completely predictable) turn of events, Duke sees her brother die in combat, feels responsible, and can’t face her again. So she becomes the evil Baroness, a lieutenant to McMullen and his top scientist, a sinister looking guy with a mask over his face and a penchant for playing with cobra’s (hmmm…wonder who HE is going to become?). Anyway, the other backstory is the one between G.I. Joe ninja Snake Eyes and the evil ninja Storm Shadow. Apparently they were raised in the same dojo/monastery/whatever, and have always hated each other. Storm Shadow kills their sensei/poobah/whatever, causing Snake Eyes to seek revenge. As you can probably tell, the backstories are pretty cliched and you know where all this is heading, but like a bad train wreck, you can’t turn your head away.
So McMullen’s operatives finally get ahold of the nanomites, and he decides to unleash them on Paris as payback for what France did to his long dead ancestor. And it’s up to the Joes to stop him. In the process, the Joes cause more destruction to Paris than a thousand warheads equipped with nanomites ever could. They cause massive traffic accidents, tear through buildings, smash everything within a 10 mile radius, and still are unable to stop the villains from bringing down the Eiffel Tower. And oh yeah, the McMullen crew manages to capture Duke. And they still have more nanomites to foist on the rest of the world. So the Joes must travel to McMullen’s secret base in the Arctic, to rescue their friend and stop the destruction that is being prepared to be unleashed across the globe.
Defying Logic AND Physics
Well, I’ve already mentioned a few problems that the movie has, but the complete list is so expansive, it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with the story. It’s hard to imagine a story that has more plot holes or makes less sense. The story starts with McMullen stealing nanomites that he created….why would he need to turn them over to NATO to begin with, only to have to steal them back? Why didn’t he just keep them in the first place? There are several “why did they need to do that” moments in the movie…like Zartan, the master of disguise, escapes from the G. I. Joe base…and then kills an Arab and steals his clothing in the middle of the desert. Huh? You’ve already made your escape…why do you need a disguise now? Speaking of bases, both bases are supposed to be top secret, nearly impenetrable fortresses, yet they are accessed so easily that it brings you to believe a child with a broken pop gun and a pet hamster could break in, no problem. Seriously, if you have an underground base in the Saraha, wouldn’t you put a few landmines around it so that enemies with giant drill like transportation devices couldn’t just waltz in and burn down your crib?
Of course, the real icing on the cake comes during the battle royale, when the baddies and the Joes are squaring off at the baddies base beneath the Arctic ice in a vicious winner-takes-all brawl. McMullen decides that the best way to take down the Joes is to blow the ice above the base and allow it to sink, crushing the base and everyone in or around it. Of course, if one stops and thinks this plan through, you’ll realize that in order for it to work, ice would have to defy the laws of physics. I mean, if icebergs sank, the Titanic wouldn’t have had a thing to worry about. But in Joe world, up is down and down is up, and the best way for villains to kill heroes is to drown them by way of sinking ice.
Plot holes and physics defying lunacy are far from the only problem in this clunker. The dialogue is the worst part. McMullen’s ancestor screams for help as the iron mask is attached to his face, but a more hideous form of torture would be forcing him to read the G.I. Joe screen play a hundred times. The dialogue in this movie makes a Michael Dudikoff film look like a TCM classic by comparison. Lines like “You were almost killed, you have a right to be concerned” and “When all else fails, we don’t” abound. In the final showdown between Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, Storm Shadow says, “When our master was killed, you took a vow of silence. Now you will die without a word.” Or something like that. In addition to being a horrible piece of dialogue, it’s also like a randomly thrown in fact…nowhere else in the whole movie is it explained why Snake Eyes doesn’t talk. As for other characters, Ripcord and Duke have an argument early on about his ability to pilot planes (even though he is not in the Air Force) and wouldn’t ya know it, at the end of the movie he is forced to pilot an advanced fighter jet created by McMullen, in an effort to bring down warheads armed with the nanomites. Of course, the firing mechanism on the fighter is voice activated, so instead of pressing a button to fire a missile, you actually have to say the word “Fire!” But wait! There is a twist. This is McMullen’s creation, and he’s Scottish, so you have to say the word “Fire” in GAELIC. I kid you not. I chortle as I write this at the sheer incomprehensibility of this plot device. Luckily for Ripcord, one of the Joes just happens to know a bit of Gaelic (I guess…maybe they have a translating earpiece or something) and so is able to tell him how to operate the weapons system. Again, this is another example of McMullen defying logic and doing something that makes absolutely no sense. The best example of hilariously horrible dialogue, however, is after the destruction of Paris and the Eiffel Tower, when the the U.S. President is told that the “French are upset.” The only thing that could have made that any better was the French threatening to write a very very bad letter.
Elsewhere, the bad guys murmur original and sophisticated last rite pronouncements such as “Now you die.” Nice…haven’t heard that a thousand times before. And of course, as the curtain is drawn on the major baddies, they tell us “This has only just begun.” Really? In this movie they steal their own weapons and try to make ice sink, so I don’t think the world has much to fear from them. Of course, they could secretly be geniuses using the Joes to carry out their dirty work. The nanomites are supposed to be their advanced weaponry, but the Joes are the ones who cause the real damage. I refer to their complete destruction of Paris, although to be fair, the baddies have an SUV equipped with a fork lift that tosses cars like they were whiffle balls. They have all this advanced sophisticated weaponry, yet Snake Eyes is able to use his sword to slice through the top of their SUV like it’s a can of soup. Memo to Cobra…when making suits that repel everything from submachine guns to bazookas, you might want to check that it’s able to repel more primitive weaponry. Had the Joes all carried pikes, maces, and longswords, this movie might have been an hour shorter.
The performances are, for the most part, absolutely atrocious. That’s not to say some of them aren’t fun to watch…Arnold Vosloo may be campy, but he always is fun in the roles he plays. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has a certain flair as the enigmatic and mysterious Doctor (AKA Cobra Commander). Sienna Miller cavorts around in a leather catsuit most of the movie, and she brings a lot of energy to her role as cunning vicious vixen. All that aside though, the acting is just terrible. At the top of the list are the two heroes, Channing Tatum and Marlon Wayans as Duke and Ripcord, respectively. Tatum spends half the movie glowering and is never fun when he’s onscreen, which is not good considering that having fun with these one dimensional characters is all that can redeem them. Wayans is a bit more full of life, but he becomes the latest addition to a long list of worst comedic sidekicks ever to appear in film, joining Jar-Jar Binks, Mudflap and Skids, and Bumpo from Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. He’s just not funny. Dennis Quaid phones it in as Hawk. Christopher Eccleston tries hard, but in the end he’s left with a script that makes him nothing less than the dumbest super-villain on the planet.
So what’s to like? Well, as I said at the beginning, the movie knows it is bad, and most of the cast seems to know it too, so they play up their campy roles and act like they enjoy themselves, especially, as I mentioned, the villains. Even if some of his dialogue was terrible, I enjoyed the character of Storm Shadow. Byung-hun Lee, the actor who portrayed him, I thought showed some promise if he were placed in a more serious movie. It was also probably a good idea to make Sienna Miller a major part of this movie. In addition to looking good, she brought a lot of energy to the screen in spite of the fact that she had to share a good bit of it with the stiff and lifeless Tatum.
Some of the action sequences are cool, if a bit over the top. Everyone has weaponry that is less realistic than the stuff you’d find in a Bond movie, but it was fun to watch nonetheless. Pistols that send people flying farther than the Starship Enterprise, jet packs that are easily controllable, armor that’s virtually indestructible (against modern weapons), and all sorts of other gadgets and gizmos that were quite a pleasure to observe. Also, there were several martial arts scenes that I thought were fun, usually involving Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow.
The bottom line is that no matter which way you cut it, this movie is atrociously bad but deliciously fun. Go in with the same amount of expectations you might have for Saturday reruns of Dora the Explorer, and you should come out having had a good time anyway. That said, no amount of fun can erase the fact that practically nothing about this movie makes any kind of sense. The best decision the studio made was to keep critics from having an early look at it.